A great deal of Horizon 2’s beauty on Xbox One comes from its wonderful new setting. Southern Europe forms the basis of Horizon 2, specifically the South of France and parts of Northern Italy. Fulton confirms that these areas were considered as potential spots for the first Horizon, but they were being looked at as two separate suggestions.

“These parts of Europe were on the table for Horizon 1, but we were actually talking about them individually,” he says. “We could do Northern Italy, or we could do the South of France, around the Côte d'Azur.”

“What we were able to do with Horizon 2 was say, ‘You know what? Let’s throw a net over all that. Let’s see what we can get from these areas combined.’

“[It’s] a place of vast landscapes, amazing vistas, beautiful, unspoilt scenery, and incredible diversity. From the foothills of the Alps, right down the Mediterranean Sea. From the rolling hills of Tuscany in Italy, across the border into France and beautiful Provence and the glamorous Côte d'Azur. Incredible variety, amazing landscapes, amazing vistas for you to explore. So that doesn’t hurt, having a beautiful world to start with is a big start.”

We saw but a small sliver of the world that will feature in Horizon 2 but the difference between it and Colorado from the original is stark. The few parts of Horizon 2 we saw already display a huge amount of variety, ranging from quiet country roads framed by undulating pastures to narrow, cobblestone streets in a small European town. From dusty dirt tracks to concrete tunnels piercing through mountains.

A not-so-quiet village.

However, looks aren’t everything when it comes to the places Playground has chosen to replicate in Horizon 2.

“We have these iconic towns and iconic cities in this part of Europe, but we didn’t pick them purely because they were beautiful and they had that visual diversity,” explains lead game designer Martin Connor. “One of the big decisions as to which ones we used and which ones we didn’t use was the road network that these towns are built upon.”

“So over the years that these towns and villages and cities have been expanding the road networks have become almost spider web-like in nature, so you can imagine from a racing game’s perspective the sort of options that gives you.

“You’ve got some of the denser towns in Tuscany where it feels almost claustrophobic, and then you come down to the Côte d'Azur and you’ve got boulevards that are, like, 80 to 100 metres wide. That’s 250 mile an hour racing, weaving through the traffic as you go. And it’s that sort of variety that we have because of the towns and the cities that we’ve arrived at.”

That said, it was going to take more than a picturesque setting to get Horizon 2 looking its finest. The original Forza Horizon was an excellent-looking game but, with the advent of new hardware, honing the beauty pillar of Forza Horizon 2 required more complex solutions.

Let There Be Light

“We believe next gen beauty isn’t about poly counts,” says Fulton. “It’s not about texture resolution. Those are last-gen concepts. Next-gen beauty is about light.”

“It’s about light and how it plays on every surface in the world. How it reacts to them. How it scatters from them. It’s about the way sunlight glints on the bodywork of a car. It’s about the way the entire world reflects back at you from the surface of a puddle in a cobbled street.

“It’s about really revealing those imperfections that make something feel real. I’m talking about the minute scratches on a brake disc. I’m talking about the flaky paint and rusted metal of an old barn door. That’s what next-gen beauty is.”

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We believe next gen beauty isn’t about poly counts. It’s not about texture resolution. Those are last-gen concepts. Next-gen beauty is about light.

Fulton explains the team had an enormous head start realising this, starting with the graphics engine, image-based lighting system, and physically modelled materials of Forza Motorsport 5.

“Our challenge in this game was really to make that dynamic,” he explains. “To make those systems work and combine in a vast world at any time of day, and in any atmospheric or weather condition.”

“We also had to make that scale. We have a huge world which we need to fill with light. Light from headlights, light from streetlights.”

Looking real is something Forza Horizon 2 is already excelling at. We’ll be going into more detail on the game’s weather effects at a later date but, in terms of just the lighting itself, after seeing it deconstructed in front of us it’s properly admirable just how authentically Horizon’s sun, streetlamps, and headlights illuminate the world.

“Light is a really big deal for us for this game, and the reference points we’ve chosen for this game are famous for their quality of light,” says art director Ben Penrose. “So on this game we didn’t want to leave anything to chance. We didn’t want to give you an impression of what the places are like that we visited and have tried to reproduce. We wanted to model it as accurately as possible and have all that stuff work with the physically based set-up that we’ve got from Forza 5.”

“So what we’ve settled on is a physically accurate model of Earth’s atmosphere,” Penrose grins.

Digging the sunlight effect on the paint!

Technical director Alan Roberts breezes through the ins-and-outs of a real-life optical phenomenon known as Rayleigh scattering, which is what causes both the vivid blue hue of the midday sky and the red and yellow tones of the sky at sunset. In a nutshell, the sky in Horizon 2 is blue because science dictates it, not because an artist glanced out a window and settled on the closest shade he or she could find.

“This now means that we can simulate the way that light interacts with particles in the atmosphere,” says Roberts. “We no longer have to have artists picking the colour of the sky from a colour picker; we can model the amount of particles in the atmosphere and the sky and the lighting reacts accordingly.”

“That’s how it works in real-life, and that’s exactly how it’s working here,” adds Penrose.

The pair go one step further, stripping away the particles from Horizon 2’s atmosphere. We can now see the stars (which Penrose assures us are also accurately modelled) because, as Roberts explains, “[i]t’s like being on the moon or a planet without an atmosphere.”

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Now every single light in a scene is dynamic, which is only something we’ve been able to achieve with the switch to a next-gen platform.

Actual night in Horizon 2, however, required a completely different set of tech solutions. The lighting techniques popular last generation aren’t sufficient for Playground’s plans for Horizon 2.

The good news for us, as well as the team who strived to get it right at Playground, is that the improvement is marked. From the way headlights slice through the unlit country streets to the way a brightly-lit tunnel’s lights reflect off (and roll over) the bodywork of a car, it’s all seriously good-looking.

“With Horizon we pushed dynamic lights with the headlights,” says Penrose. “Now every single light in a scene is dynamic, which is only something we’ve been able to achieve with the switch to a next-gen platform.”

“The headlights themselves are no longer just standard dynamic lights; they’ve actually got modelled aberration and chromatic aberration from a proper headlight, which is why when drive around the scene and you see the headlights reacting to certain objects you’ll see a slight rainbowing on the edge. That’s all down to that particular part of the system.”